Category Archives: Internet Happenings

Moorabool Council Double Standard on NBN Towers

With construction of the wireless component of the National Broadband Network (NBN) getting underway in some regional areas of Australia, the inevitable squabbles over where transmission towers should and should not be built are in full swing. The process calls for calm, consultation with councils and residents, and transparent information flow. Rural councils need to [...]

NBN Wireless Towers Will Not Kill You

With areas around the Ballarat region to become some of the first areas in Australia to receive NBN Co’s wireless solution, there has been a lot of hullabaloo about the erection of the towers to actually deliver the service. I respect that people have the right to choose whether they have the towers on their [...]

RF Interference From HFC

I’ll start off by saying I am by no means an RF engineer, so I may be completely wrong about what I am about to write about. I am however, quite confident in my empirical observations over time. I got into an interesting conversation about RF interference generated by HFC systems – (often touted as [...]

Facebook Ads: Does Anyone Check Them?

Like most people, I’ve always felt that many of the adverts alongside profiles in Facebook are undoubtedly dodgy. Take these couple of “iPhone” ads I’ve noticed this week: The first one boldly proclaims an “iPhone 4S” for only $8.45? Even if the price was correct – (lets be honest, it sounds like crap to me) [...]

Browser Update 2011

With just a few days left in 2011, I’ve taken a moment to have a look at the web statistics for this site, with a view to having a look at how the ongoing browser wars are travelling. In March, I had a look at how things had been over the previous six months, and [...]

Why Legislated Internet Filtering is Utterly Pointless

The powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, believe that the way to stop people from viewing and distributing the so-called “worst of the worst” or copyright protected material online is to legislate various forms of filtering mechanisms. In Australia, we have Stephen Conroy’s mandatory internet filtering scheme. In the US, there is the proposed [...]

Screw You, Greedy Music Industry

We’ve heard a lot lately about how piracy and music downloads are supposedly killing the music industry. How all those nasty people downloading music for free are “taking the caviar off the 50-foot marble dining tables” of the recording artists, and leaving them to cope with “only 17 bathrooms in their palatial mansions”. Poor snookums. [...]

Should File Sharing Be Legalised?

The ongoing battle between AFACT and the Australian ISP iiNet through the so-called iiTrial has become a very public face of the file-sharing debate, particularly in Australia. Is file-sharing “good”, or is it “bad”? A very black and white question the answer to which, is generally quite grey. I read with interest an article brought [...]